Summercat:Obbi: I really have a hard time understanding the business around Facebook games. It's like I'm missing some giant piece of the logic puzzle to figure out how any of this is supposed to last.

Free to Play, Pay to Win games. People will pay for just one more turn.

I wrote that as one more tern. I need to go make a Bird-based game. BBL.

Mobage also follows this shiat-tastic model. No thanks.

Tried getting into War of Heroes. Imagine chess, but where you're free to spend as much as you like to upgrade all of your pieces to queen. Now, remove the strategy of chess, and base victory on who has the most powerful pieces. Who wins? The guy that spent the most farking money, every time.

Alliance battles are still fun, but the rest of the game is enough of an obvious cash grab to make one sick.

/Yes, I will crawl back to my ancient copy of Medieval Total War: II, TYVM

born_yesterday:Summercat: Obbi: I really have a hard time understanding the business around Facebook games. It's like I'm missing some giant piece of the logic puzzle to figure out how any of this is supposed to last.

Free to Play, Pay to Win games. People will pay for just one more turn.

I wrote that as one more tern. I need to go make a Bird-based game. BBL.

Mobage also follows this shiat-tastic model. No thanks.

Tried getting into War of Heroes. Imagine chess, but where you're free to spend as much as you like to upgrade all of your pieces to queen. Now, remove the strategy of chess, and base victory on who has the most powerful pieces. Who wins? The guy that spent the most farking money, every time.

Alliance battles are still fun, but the rest of the game is enough of an obvious cash grab to make one sick.

/Yes, I will crawl back to my ancient copy of Medieval Total War: II, TYVM

Actually, a better example would have been poker. Except you pay to improve your hand, and there's no money in the pot.

If anything popular comes out, Zynga will just copy it and add -ville to the end of its name, and then muscle their way to the top of that game type using their huge player base and in-game advertising.

Zynga's issue is that they got too greedy. Had they been willing to post only, say, 25% of the spam on people's walls that they actually did, they could have had a nice little niche as "that company that makes games for Facebook". Instead, they became so insidious that game updates are now renowned as the scourge of Facebook.